Smartphones and social media apps are making us hasty, inattentive and less thoughtful. Now the question is what are we going to do about that?

I think a lot about whether social media are good or bad for society. I’ve written about how they make it easier for people to form mobs, facilitate the weaponization of emotion, and allow bad ideas to spread like disease through early civilizations.

But I also have to wonder: Are social media bad for our brains?

This question was on my mind while reading Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr wrote just as the social media phenomenon was really getting underway, but even then he offered a cautionary note: The transition from books to screens was undermining rigorous thinking. Things have only gotten worse since.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that technology has changed people’s mental processes. Preliterate people had a lot less access to knowledge than people who can read — but preliterate people tended to have amazing memories by today’s standards.

Carr notes that in Plato’s Phaedrus, dating to when written language was new, one of Plato’s subjects argued that writing would destroy memory: “It will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.” The written word, he said, “is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.”

But Carr goes on to say that writing took hold, scrolls were replaced by books, typography improved and, eventually, book reading brought on a different kind of thinking. Books made it possible to consider deep and complex ideas at length, and — Carr cites research — people’s brains actually changed in response.

The natural preliterate state of our brains is something akin to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, constantly interrupting ourselves to look around and check our environments. That’s a useful trait when you’re surrounded by saber-toothed tigers and other cavemen with clubs. But book-reading requires “an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single static object.” The brains of book readers, Carr notes, are actually different, with the parts that allow focus and attention enhanced, and the parts that promote scattered attention suppressed.

Now, of course, actual bound books are fading, and people read much more on screens. As a result they tend to multitask — read something for a bit, check email, go to see whether you’ve gotten any “likes” on Facebook, go back to reading for a bit, check Twitter. And social media tend to make that worse by subjecting users to a vast stream of bite-size items. (Twitter limits users to 280 characters, but most don’t even come close to the limit.) Deep thinking is becoming less common, and worse, this seems to be particularly true among the academic/political/intellectual class that’s most on Twitter.

Then, of course, there is the emotional charge. Social media designers manipulate people’s emotions to keep them “addicted” to their products. (I put “addicted” in quotes, but really, that’s what it is.) People get used to this and — as with addicts in general — ordinary life seems drab by comparison. They’re always looking for another little charge of excitement, anger or whatever.

As a recent Scott Adams cartoon has Dilbert saying: “My digital devices have reduced my attention span so much I can barely concentrate on work. I need a dopamine hit every four seconds or I look for something else to do.”

His co-worker’s reply: “Would you mind terribly if I play with my phone while you drone on and on?”

Many a true word is spoken in jest, and this cartoon does seem to reflect reality. Americans on average check their phones 80 times a day; for millennials, it’s 150 times. And people do seem to get riled up more easily in recent years.

Diane Francis blames smartphones, saying that they’re as addictive as cigarettes and with second-hand harms galore. But I don’t think it’s the phones themselves. Most people aren’t being constantly distracted from reality by the Kindle app, or by Google Maps. It’s the social media apps on the smartphones that are the problem, much more than the smartphones themselves.

This is the point in the column where I’m supposed to offer a solution, some sort of technical fix or new law that will address the problem. But I’m afraid I don’t have one. I’ll just observe that if it seems to you that our society is growing less thoughtful, and more hasty and emotional, you’re probably right, and social media are probably playing a big role in that transformation. Use that information as you see fit.